I forgot the game had been so well run for the last decade or so anything has to be better than the farce we’re used to

possibly, but all the facts are not on the table, and people are throwing mud at hetherington and they don't know whats actually has or is going to happen. i personally think the super league clubs should be franchised again and done properly this time. and all the tv revenue should stay in super league i think the small clubs have held the big clubs back too long. the middle 8's are an awful concept, But i will hold my judgement and superb to any new system until i actually now what is going to happen.

You are a total Idiot









How are championship clubs holding you back when hardly any Super league teams are running the reserves.

If all the club's are in favour of the changes, then why not just vote for it through the proper channels? Hetherington would still be peeved, but at least the agreed process would be maintained.
Also, at least the 3 chairman at the press conference had the bottle to face up to the media about this, the rest just cowered behind them

So the answer to all the games woes is the fact we don't have a reserve league, and i am the idiot.

Probably no one. 11 to 1 was just for scraping the 8's. The 7 to 5 was "about key relegation issues" which may cover more than just the 8's format, some of those clubs might not even want 1 up 1 down.

Are you sure about that? What if they were the only ones invited to the press conference? What if they didn't have a long enough table and enough chairs to fit supposedly 11 people?

Also you don't get this amount of confuddlery in other sports, just have a look at the professionalism the FA, Premier League and The EFL have shown when they announced they would be meeting to discuss a winter break.

And all the championship clubs also have a say in the future so its not just 11 to 1 is it seen as fev and Halifax have blasted the idea

You are right.
However, they should have been nowhere near the media until the "idea" had been ratified and agreed properly.
Their actions (in going public) are amateurish an disrespectful to the rest of the RL pyramid.

Doesn't take bottle to turn up to a press conference to announce something that as it turns out hasn't actually happened. Takes stupidity.

I doubt Hetherington really cares that much about the Super 8s format. But he does know what it takes to run a small club in the lower leagues and shafting them to try and preserve the status of SL clubs is pretty shady behaviour by club owners who have failed to run their clubs effectively (all of the other 10 UK owners apart from Moran arguably).

I agree. I'm actually in favour to some degree of the changes that are being proposed, but it seems like the SL clubs are taking us into our own version of the Australian SL wars.

That'd be the experience of losing players to union and being humped every time there's a fixture clash with the footy? Plus fighting a losing battle with London despite having perhaps the second-wealthiest backer the sport has seen?

I don't despise the man but I'm unconvinced by his track record.

As an Everton (as well as Saints) season ticket holder I was delighted to see Elstone leave Goodison, but less enthralled to see him get a job high up in RL given the cock ups he'd had his fingerprints all over while at Everton and it seems he's wasted no time at being involved in bungling errors in this sport.

God help Rugby League with this guy fronting it.

Out of interest, what cock ups was he involved in? Genuine question.

So Hetherington didn't let Lee Smith go to RU & then couldn't recognise a crocked player when he returned? Whereas IL sold a player RU for £250k & to NRL for £700k (or whatever the world record fee was) and got them back for £nil/£200k, that's just bad business isn't it? Unconvinced? Really?
As for the second wealthiest backer who so rarely visited the Harlequinns that he perhaps thought he bought shares in the RU side, he never contributed any money to that squad - perhaps thats a lesson in that we shouldn't deal with Scottish based backers anymore. As for us Wigan fans, we have nothing but gratitude for what he has done for our club.

You can just make the strings out on the ones behind them.

A bit like this?

Robert Elstone denies he is Ian Lenaghan's puppet. How cringeworthy.

Lol at butt hurt Leeds fans crying because they lost 11-1

Regards

King James

reading statements from the championship clubs perhaps he's the only one who gives a toss about them. certainly the 3 moneygrabbers don't

We're talking David Hughes, right?

Lenagan's record as a Rugby League businessman is pretty abysmal by any standards - the financial performance of Wigan is embarrassing not just in the scale of the losses but moreover in the direction of travel - it's getting worse and worse every year.

I don't think Hetherington needs to take any lessons on buying and selling in the transfer market from anyone. This is the man who sold Iestyn Harris to Wales for £1m (plus a corporate box in Cardiff) then sold him again to Bradford for £550k.

Leeds did a good bit of business with Zak Hardaker too